Chapter Review: Introductory

CONTEXT

Introductory is Chapter 1 of Thorstein Veblen’s influential 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is a mere 9 pages long in the version of the book I bought that Compass Circle published on May 7, 2020. Although Veblen, an American living in Minnesota, is considered to be an economist, his take on it is from a psychological and sociological point of view. In this regard, he predates the rise of the new disciplines of behavioral economics and behavioral finance by about 110 years. Those new disciplines try to model messy humans beings as they really behave in the real world, not as some mythical rational creature in some mythical market.

Introductory reads much like a sociology text. For me, Introductory is distinctly reminiscent of Peter Berger's 1963 masterpiece, Introduction to Sociology (reviewed here). From what I understand of modern cognitive and social science, his take on the human condition is amazingly accurate, at least in the first 9 pages. Maybe modern science has debunked at least some of what he believed or postulated, but from what I know, Veblen probably seems to have gotten things surprisingly right.

The Theory of the Leisure Class presents a devastating criticism of the super wealthy class he observed in the late 1800s. Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to highlight the psychological and sociological aspects of how people like John D. Rockefeller lived their super wealthy lives. In his view, the super wealthy were modern equivalents of primitive tribal chiefs.

The book is short, 170 pages in my version, but it is not easy (for me) to read. Veblen's prose is ponderous and convoluted. I had to read some passages four or five times before what he was saying became clear. For people comfortable with this sort of dense writing, the book will probably be a breeze to get through. But for others, this will be a slog.

Chapter review

Veblen starts by asserting that barbarian cultures of feudal Europe and feudal Japan were marked by rigid class distinctions in the kinds of work or activities that people engaged in. Engaging in warfare and priestly activities were honorable and reserved for the elites or the leisure class. The more mundane and less honorable or even dishonorable work was for the inferior classes. Servants of the elites were often held in higher esteem than most other occupations. In this view, one can see class differences and how society valued people based on what they did. This was not necessarily a meritocracy. Titles and positions were often hereditary.

In earlier stages of barbarism, Veblen asserts that the leisure class was sometimes less differentiated in situations where each individual have more impact on people’s lives. The inferior classes generally constituted slaves, manual laborers, women and dependents, presumably mostly children. Upper class men were often proscribed by custom or social norm from engaging in manual labor or industry. That attitude lasted through the 1800s and 1900s. It still exists to a non-trivial extent today. Veblen comments on the rise of the leisure class as he saw it:

“The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments, according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit enters. 

But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it seldom results in the subversion of entire suppression of a standpoint once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not fallen into disuse.”

A couple of observations on that come to mind. First, Veblen apparently considered his time to to be a period of consistently warlike barbarism. That barbarism significantly retained the ancient distinctions about honorable vs dishonorable work and the corresponding attitudes toward the people in those occupations.

Second, although Veblen refers to earlier cultures as ‘peaceable’ and modern cultures as ‘consistently warlike’, peaceable does not mean non-violent. He takes pains to point out that the evidence available to him in 1899 indicated that human cultures were always violent and brutal. By consistently warlike, Veblen argues that the modern warlike situation arises once society has progressed to to point where society passes from primitive ‘peaceable savagery’ to ‘a predatory phase of life’ dominated by exploitation of people and groups both inside and outside the culture. In this, he seems to be at least somewhat equating warlike with predatory or exploitative:

“When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess -- trophies -- find a place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. 

Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the taking of life -- the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute or human -- is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.”

On Veblen’s view, what elevates society from peaceable savagery to the modern barbaric predatory phase is acquisition of technical knowledge and industrialization. Material circumstances change and sufficient wealth is created by industrialization that it makes endless predation and war worth the cost. In other words, when there is enough to fight over, humans will fight over it. Assuming that correctly states the argument, it is an interesting observation to say the least. Is that still a dominant cultural norm in today?

In Chapter 1, a person can see important but unpleasant aspects of Western society in 2020 that Veblen saw in 1899. At least that what it looks like to this novice.

For people who are interested, some or all of the book is available for free online. The copyright expired. Chapter 1 is here.

WATCH OUT FOR BURNING CELL TOWERS —

Cell-tower attacks by idiots who claim 5G spreads COVID-19 reportedly hit US

US warns carriers to boost security, citing reports of attacks in several states.

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly issuing alerts to wireless telecom providers and law enforcement agencies about potential attacks on cell towers and telecommunications workers by 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theorists. The DHS warned that there have already been "arson and physical attacks against cell towers in several US states."

The preposterous claim that 5G can spread the coronavirus, either by suppressing the immune system or by directly transmitting the virus over radio waves, led to dozens of tower burnings in the UK and mainland Europe. Now, the DHS "is preparing to advise the US telecom industry on steps it can take to prevent attacks on 5G cell towers following a rash of incidents in Western Europe fueled by the false claim that the technology spreads the pathogen causing COVID-19," The Washington Post reported last week.

The DHS alert will include "advice on ways to reduce the risk of attack, including installing appropriate sensing and barriers, cyber-intrusion detection systems, closed-circuit television and monitoring drone activity near towers," the Post article said. A telecom-industry official said that carriers in the US "have seen sporadic attacks on their cell towers that were apparently prompted by COVID-19 disinformation" over the past few weeks, the Post wrote.

In addition to warning telecoms, DHS reportedly issued an intelligence report on the topic "to senior federal officials and law enforcement agencies around the country," ABC News reported Saturday. DHS also teamed with the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center to issue a joint intelligence bulletin to federal officials and law enforcement agencies, the ABC News report said.

"We assess conspiracy theories linking the spread of COVID-19 to the expansion of the 5G cellular network are inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure globally and that these threats probably will increase as the disease continues to spread, including calls for violence against telecommunications workers," the DHS intelligence report said, according to ABC.

ABC did not publish the full intelligence report but provided several quotes from it. We contacted DHS and the USTelecom trade group today and will update this article if we get any response.

Update at 5:20pm ET: The DHS told Ars that it does not "comment on classified products, including official marked documents," but that it "remains committed to protecting the American public from infrastructure attacks" and that its "intelligence arm remains vigilant in looking for any kind of emerging threat to the homeland."

“Misinformation campaigns”

ABC quoted DHS as saying that "since December 2019, unidentified actors conducted at least five arson incidents targeting cell towers in Memphis, Tenn., that resulted in more than $100,000 in damages... Additionally, 14 cell towers in western Tennessee, between February and April, were purposely turned off by way of disabling their electrical breakers."

The warning to law enforcement agencies said that an April 22 Facebook post "encouraged individuals associated with anarchist extremist ideology to commit acts of sabotage by attacking buildings and 5G towers around the world… in furtherance of an 'International Day of Sabotage'" and that videos have been posted online "showing people how to damage or destroy cell towers," according to ABC.

"Violent extremists have drawn from misinformation campaigns online that claim wireless infrastructure is deleterious to human health and helps spread COVID-19, resulting in a global effort by like-minded individuals to share operational guidance and justification for conducting attacks against 5G infrastructure, some of which have already prompted arson and physical attacks against cell towers in several US states," the DHS report said. The DHS report also warned of possible attacks against the electric grid.

The World Health Organization maintains a list of COVID-19 myths, including the 5G conspiracy theory. "Viruses cannot travel on radio waves/mobile networks," the WHO explains. "COVID-19 is spreading in many countries that do not have 5G mobile networks."

Rather than being spread by radio waves, the WHO notes, "COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. People can also be infected by touching a contaminated surface and then their eyes, mouth, or nose."

Conspiracy theories also suggest that 5G contributes to the coronavirus pandemic by suppressing the immune system. But as Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote recently, the immune-system claim is "completely evidence- and mechanism-free.

"In both these cases, the only 'evidence' offered in support is the timing of 5G rollouts versus the appearance of the coronavirus in some locations, as well as maps that compare the locations of 5G services to the locations with the highest incidence of SARS-CoV-2," Timmer wrote. "Neither of these make sense as evidence. 5G was present in a variety of locations for a while without coronavirus appearing in them," and "plenty of cities without 5G service have also had high incidence of the virus."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/prepare-for-cell-tower-attacks-by-5g-covid-19-conspiracy-theorists-us-warns/

Conspiracy theorists, far-right extremists around the world seize on the pandemic

The coronavirus is providing a global rallying cry for conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists on both sides of the Atlantic.

People seizing on the pandemic range from white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe, according to a POLITICO review of thousands social media posts and interviews with misinformation experts tracking their online activities. They also include far-right populists on both continents who had previously tried to coordinate their efforts after the 2016 American presidential election.

Not all online groups peddling messages on the pandemic have links to the far right, but those extremists have become especially vocal in using the outbreak to push their political agenda at a time of deepening public uncertainty and economic trauma. They are piggybacking on social media to promote coronavirus-related themes drawn from multiple sources — among them, Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns, the Trump administration’s musings about the coronavirus’ origins and anti-Muslim themes from India’s nationalist ruling party.

“Honestly, it’s a dream come true for any and every hate group, snake oil salesman and everything in between,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a fact-checker in the Balkans who has watched ultranationalist groups promoting hate-filled messages on social media about the coronavirus, often against Jewish communities.

Civil rights advocates have warned for months that the coronavirus could aid recruiting for the most extreme white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups — those actively rooting for society’s collapse. Some online researchers say they also worry about the barrage of false messages from extremist groups feeding what the U.N. has dubbed an “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from fiction.

Opponents of government lockdown orders have used online platforms to organize protests across the U.S., including rallies where activists displayed guns inside Michigan’s state capitol. In Europe, rumors linking the coronavirus to 5G wireless technology have led to dozens of arson attacks on telecommunications masts — a phenomenon that now appears to have spread to Canada.

“It's like hitting conspiracy bingo,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, which is tracking coronavirus misinformation.

From 4chan to Facebook

As the world economy craters and the coronavirus’ global death toll ticks past 280,000 people, extremist messages are finding fertile ground on fringe online platforms like 4chan, Telegram and a gamer hangout called Discord. From there, such harmful content can make its way to mainstream sites like Facebook and Google-owned YouTube — each boasting roughly 2 billion users apiece — despite the companies’ attempts to weed out violent or dangerous content.

Facebook said last week that one collection of fake accounts and pages it removed in April — tied to two anti-immigrant websites in the U.S. — had drawn more than 200,000 followers with messages including the hashtag “#ChinaVirus” and a false claim that the coronavirus mainly kills white people. Twitter announced Monday that it would begin more aggressively labeling tweets that contain misleading or harmful coronavirus information.

But plenty of other fake coronavirus content continues to thrive online. That includes a slickly produced online video, called “Plandemic,” that garnered millions of views across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook over the weekend by promoting bogus medical cures and other conspiracy theories tied to the coronavirus. The video remains in wide circulation.

One coronavirus-related term, “Coronachan,” has also exploded on social media, first emerging in January and drawing more than 120,000 shares on Twitter in one week in late April, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that tracks extremist groups. (The term is a play on the name of 4chan, a message board that is a favorite gathering spot for the global far right.) In Germany, Telegram groups where influential extremists and far-right activists attack vulnerable groups have doubled their number of followers, to more than 100,000 participants since February, according to a review by POLITICO of those accounts.

The themes of far-right posts include long-standing grievances, including allegations that migrants spread disease, support for President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, antagonism toward the EU or opposition to gun control. One online rumor, accusing Microsoft founder Bill Gates of creating the coronavirus, echoes centuries-old conspiracy theories and Anti-Semitic tropes about global elites pulling the world’s strings.

“These aren’t new lines they are spinning,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They will use anything they can, whether it’s coronavirus or something else, to bring people into their radical world.”

Public figures helping stoke the fires include French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen, whose Facebook account has more than 1.5 million followers, and Trump, who has defended his use of the term “Chinese virus” and pushed the theory that the disease may have come from a lab in China, despite pushback from his intelligence and defense agencies.

Extremist groups on the two continents have tried before to coordinate their messaging, with middling success.

After Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, far-right online communities sprouted up across the U.S. and Europe, at first using online platforms like Facebook and Google before shifting their focus to smaller, less-regulated networks to share conspiracy theories or organize protests.

Americans like Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, also tried to export U.S.-style online tactics in hopes of uniting European right-wing groups like Italy’s Northern League party and Le Pen’s National Rally in France, though, as POLITICO reported last year, he struggled to win over movements on the Continent.

Now, as the coronavirus gives the far right a new impetus to find audiences, many European activists are wielding the same U.S.-style tactics they have spent years learning to emulate, including the creation of online “meme banks” of photos designed to spread widely. That leaves them less in need of outside help, according to researchers tracking their movements.

“Europe’s far-right no longer needs additional resources from its transatlantic supporters,” said Chloe Colliver, who heads the digital research unit at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Blaming minorities

It does not take much digging through the online platforms to find far-right messages on the health crisis.

In Italy, extremist news outlets have flooded social media with reports blaming that country’s devastating coronavirus outbreak on migrants, including an online attack that singled out a Pakistani employee at a Chinese restaurant in a northern Italian town.

In France, activists called for sending non-white populations back to their “home” countries, while Le Pen, the far-right leader, alleged on Facebook that mosques had have “taken advantage of the confinement orders” by blaring “the muezzin's call to Islamic prayer” on loudspeakers.

Tommy Robinson, the British anti-immigration activist, has promoted the “#GermJihad” hashtag and reposted online messages from members of India’s ruling nationalist BJP party to his more than 36,000 followers on Telegram, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s review of his posts.

Others, on sites like Facebook and Reddit, have alleged that the Chinese created the coronavirus as a bioweapon to attack the U.S. economy, and will reap the windfall if they are not stopped. “China will become even more brazen and take down western economies with more filth in the future,” one Reddit user wrote.

Those claims go much further than the recent speculation by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the coronavirus originated in a government lab in Wuhan, China. (The president said this month that he thinks the Chinese “made a horrible mistake and they didn’t want to admit it.”)

While some online far-right users have jumped on Trump’s messages, others had already been promoting anti-China rhetoric before senior U.S. politicians began railing on Beijing, according to a review of social media posts from early February.

Attacking governments

Extremists are also using the coronavirus to call for resistance against their governments.

In Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers, users mostly in the U.S. urged people to take up arms to protest the lockdowns and protect their civil liberties, sometimes posting photos of themselves dressed in biohazard suits and carrying automatic weapons, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

European far-right groups also have called for national governments to reclaim their power from the EU — a message primarily focused on countries like Greece, Spain and Italy where some people remain bitter about how the bloc treated them during the 2008 financial crisis. Those countries similarly have seen a spike in Russian disinformation campaigns, mostly through Kremlin-backed media outlets, aimed at sowing doubt about Europe’s response to the coronavirus, according to a recent review conducted by EU disinformation officials obtained by POLITICO.

A far more extreme incident occurred in the U.S. in March, when the FBI shot and killed a Missouri man who agents said had been plotting to blow up a hospital to call attention to his white supremacist beliefs. The man, who had posted anti-Semitic remarks on Telegram hours before being killed, had chosen the target because of "media attention on the health sector" during the pandemic, the bureau said in a statement quoted by NBC News.

Misinformation experts at the Oxford Internet Institute documented Facebook groups across 33 states aimed at instigating opposition to quarantine measures that rob people of their freedoms and ability to earn a living, according to Aliaksandr Herasimenka, a postdoctoral researcher. Some had fewer than 10,000 members, while others had grown much larger.

“The similarity and design of their Facebook groups suggests that many of these protests across individual states are related to each other,” said Herasimenka. It “might be directed, not necessarily managed, but directed or inspired by some centralized lobby groups that we don't know exactly what they are.”

Facebook has removed some of the protests from its network after determining they had violated state orders by encouraging people to take actions that could spread the coronavirus. But the policy hasn’t applied consistently across the social network, and Facebook has been adamant that it is not policing people’s political opinions. The company has often left it to a global network of independent fact-checkers to debunk the worst online offenders or counter misinformation by pointing people to credible sources.

Several of the recently created U.S. Facebook groups have been spearheaded by the Dorr family, brothers who manage a series of aggressively U.S. pro-gun organizations, The Washington Post reported last month. One Dorr-connected private group called Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine attracted 118,000 members; its Pennsylvania affiliate counts 89,000, according to a review of these Facebook groups. The Dorrs did not respond to requests for comment through their advocacy organizations.

“The audience for this stuff isn't the average American news consumer and I'm not even sure the audience is the average person stuck at home sheltering in place,” said Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. “It’s people who are reluctant to take any advice or instructions from the government at any time, whether it's about guidelines on what kinds of guns you can have or whether it's health-related instructions to stay at home.”

'There's only one conversation'

The anti-vaccine movement on both continents has also latched onto the coronavirus pandemic.

Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, found posts within U.S. Facebook groups claiming the pandemic is an effort to force people into accepting vaccines and, perhaps, even a surreptitious plot to inject people with microchips. Similar messages appeared in WhatsApp messages shared widely in Italy, which has a long-standing anti-vaxxer community, while groups in France have called for a boycott of any government-backed coronavirus vaccine program.

U.S. anti-vaccine groups also organized an anti-lockdown rally this month outside California’s state capitol and have taken part in protests in New York, Colorado and Texas, using their opposition to state-ordered shutdowns as part of a broader message about personal “freedom,” The New York Times reported.

Other coronavirus themes emerging online include long-running conspiracy theories blaming the “global elites” for much of the world’s ills, particularly focusing on George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire who has long been a target for right-wing and anti-Semitic groups.

Since late January, attacks against Soros and his fellow billionaire Gates have shifted to accusing the men of either spreading the coronavirus or capitalizing on it to push a pro-vaccine agenda. Some Facebook users in private online groups seen by POLITICO also questioned whether Gates was also Jewish. Gates, who has made global public health a priority of his philanthropic efforts, has drawn their attention because of a 2015 video in which he discussed the dangers of a future global pandemic.

“Diseases have long been used to promote disinformation,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, the social media analysis firm, who has tracked the spread of coronavirus extremist content.

“But right now, there’s only one conversation that everyone is having, and that’s about the coronavirus,” he added. “The disinformation actors know that as well, and they are trying to take advantage.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/12/trans-atlantic-conspiracy-coronavirus-251325

Book Review: The Death of Expertise

The thesis of Tom Nichols’ 2017 book, The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge And Why It Matters, posits that widespread rejection and distrust of expert knowledge. He argues this amounts to a democratic dysfunction that can easily lead to some form of mob rule or autocracy. Nichols is a professor of national security affairs and expert on Russian politics.

In this short, easy to read book, Nichols builds a compelling case that Americans’ anti-elitist attitudes are moving the U.S. toward some form of mob rule or autocracy, a trend that, in Nichols’ opinion, Donald Trump’s presidency reflects. Although Nichols points to concrete actions that experts can take by increasing their own transparency, accountability and public engagement, he is ultimately not optimistic: “Tragically, I suspect that a possible resolution will lie in a disaster as yet unforeseen. It may be a [major] war or a [major] economic collapse. . . . . It may be in the emergence of an ignorant demagoguery, a process already underway in the United States and Europe, or the rise to power of a technocracy that finally runs out of patience and thus dispenses with voting as anything other than a formality.”

Nichols lays much of the blame on the American people and their distrusting attitudes toward experts, knowledge itself and democratic institutions. “The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are foundations of modern civilization.” He asserts that for “the average American”, their knowledge base is so low it has passed “uninformed” and “misinformed” to a level that is “aggressively wrong”. Many Americans just believe “dumb things” and often reject information that undermines false beliefs.

Nichols is aware that significant natural barriers against respect for knowledge and experts lie in human cognitive biology: “ We all suffer from problems, for example, like ‘confirmation bias,’ the natural tendency to only accept evidence that confirms what we already believe.” He argues that human biases are easily and routinely exploited by an ocean of online sources that are “making many of us dumber,” “meaner” and “enabling and reinforcing our human failings.” Maybe calling cognitive biases ‘failings’ misses the mark a little. Biases are normal and served well in early human evolution.

The problem is that in complex modern societies, playing on that biology is the key route that demagogues, autocrats and tyrants take in their runs for power. Understanding of that point dates at least back to Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were acutely aware of this human aspect of politics. This issue is extremely serious, not trivial.

Nichols sees flaws in modern higher education: “When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking . . . .” And, economic pressures on the press aren't helpful either: “In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and producers no longer have the patience -- or the financial luxury -- to allow journalists to develop their own expertise and deep knowledge of a subject.”[1] This media critique raises the question of whether a free press operating in a capitalist, for-profit environment can ever be up to the task of reasonably informing a public that hungers far more for entertainment and self-affirming content than ice cold, usually uncomfortable knowledge. That's a question for the experts to chew on.

The death spiral: Nichols sees the current state of affairs as one where distrust in experts and knowledge has led America to enter a death spiral that “presents an immediate danger of decay either into rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy . . . . and both threaten the United States today. . . . . the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.”

Focus on fostering transparency, finding good leaders and boosting institutional efficacy, not issues: From this observer's cognitive and social biology-based point of view, Nichols paints a picture of a society overwhelmed by an ocean of false information and effective cognitive manipulation,[2] an economically stressed professional press unable to keep up with events, inept institutions such as congress and a failing higher education system. Maybe Nichols would dispute that picture, but that is how this reader sees it.

Regardless, if that is a reasonably accurate description of the American condition, then Nichol’s call for American citizens to become better informed won't succeed. Other analyses of democracy and social and technological complexity make it clear that it is impossible for citizens to be even ‘reasonably’ informed on enough issues to make ‘informed’ voting decisions.[3] Nichols himself says almost the same thing: “. . . . there are not simply enough hours in the day for a legislator, even in a city council or a small US state . . . . to master all of the issues modern policymaking requires.”

A plausible alternative option that might break out of the death spiral is to focus not on understanding issues, an impossible task, but on trying to foster more transparency, find good leaders somehow, e.g., look for morality and honesty, and look for institutional efficacy as evidence of good governance. Whether that would have any impact is an open question, but at least it’s another way to think about things. Questions: Does Nichols put too much blame on ordinary citizens and too little on other things such as America’s corrupted pay-to-play two-party system or ideologically-inspired gridlock in governance?

Is Nichols too pessimistic about where America is heading?

Footnotes:
1. Nichols cites the fascinating case of Ben Rhodes playing an inexperienced press corps to sell president Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Rhodes was Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser. A dysfunctional congress was in the background was a key driver of the press manipulation. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. . . . . When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate after which members of congress reflect and take a vote,” he said shrugging. “But that's impossible. . . . . The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old . . . . They literally know nothing. Rhode’s implication was clear. Not only did he think the public was too stupid to understand the deal -- which was not wrong . . . . --but that everyone else, including congress, was too stupid to get it as well.”

Nichols calls this incident intolerable and assigns blame all around, including experts’ share of blame, but notes that “. . . . there is only one group of people who must bear the ultimate responsibility for this state of affairs, and only they can change any of it: the citizens of the United States of America.”

2. Regarding cognitive manipulation, Nichols comments: “Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps everything else, it is a lesson they will take with them for the rest of their lives.”

All a speaker needs to do is provoke an emotion(s) such as fear, anger, hate, disgust and/or distrust. Once that is accomplished, they have disabled the listener’s conscious reason and made their message far more persuasive regardless of its truth or falsity.

3. Regarding politics, two social scientists comment in their book Democracy for Realists: “. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”



B&B orig: 10/18/17; DP repost 5/18/20

Asymmetry Between Professional Journalism and Propaganda

Ronan, a fine young man in a complicated world

CONTEXT

Professional new reporting is tedious, difficult and complicated. Information sources often lie, have secret agendas and/or withhold or distort key facts that undermine a narrative they want to convey. To make the situation worse, reporters face enormous time pressure and a need to deliver clean dramatic narratives to a public that is easily bored with just facts and sound reasoning. Drama and violence catches the attention of eyeballs and minds, not dull facts, nuance and shades of gray.

Some of that (~40% ?) reflects how the human mind evolved. Humans like bright shiny things that are easy to comprehend and outrage, laugh or feel smug and self-righteous about. That emotional reacting is a lot of fun. But some, probably most, of that pro-infoTAINMENT mindset results from our culture and its relentless winner-take-all, polarized for-profit lack of morality. The market for human attention is intense and full on 24/7/365. Almost everyone with something to sell is desperate for the attention of as many people as possible. The ones not desperate for attention are usually selling something illegal.

Dissecting a reporter

A New York Times article, Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?, goes through some of Farrow's reporting and raises concerns about how close to, or over, the edge of professionalism vs sensationalism the reporter has come on several occasions. The article is full of tedious facts, context and analysis. It is definitely not infotainment. It is info. The key point of the article is that coming too close to the fuzzy gray line or crossing into or past it imposes a serious cost on professional journalism. Call it the damage zone.

The NYT is clear that Farrow did not make anything up. He just crossed into the damage zone several times. That hurts the credibility of all professional journalism. In these polarized times with rampant mass propaganda, coming into to the damage zone gets exaggerated and used to smear everyone else the tribe does not like.

The NYT writes about one incident:

“It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.” 

In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities. 

The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate. 

Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.”

What happened was that Cohen’s financial records were just put on restricted access. That is a normal practice in government to prevent leaks. The records never disappeared. Farrow's source either lied to him or was unaware that the records were simply subject to restricted access. The now-disgraced lawyer, Michael Avenatti, encouraged Fry to leak the documents. The NYT article comments that Avenatti was “barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article.” The NYT characterized Avenatti as “a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.”

Scrupulous attention to mind numbing details like this is what distinguishes professional journalism from dark free speech.[1] The NYT analysis of content that Farrow generates indicates that it is sometimes misleading. That fits my definition of crossing into the damage zone. NYT puts it like this:

“His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.”

What is the point here?

The point to be made is that the line between journalistic professionalism and most everything else is often complicated to clearly see, hard to avoid and easy to step into or across. As the NYT points out, when a reporter fails to disclose what they do not know for sure, a dull story is converted into a dramatic story. Telling people a great story, but then saying that although X is true, Y and Z have not been corroborated. That is a real buzz kill.

What it does show is, among other things, (1) how the human mind greatly prefers the simple dramatic to the complicated and/or ordinary, (2) how the human mind rapidly and unconsciously fills in undisclosed details to make an incomplete or ambiguous story into a satisfying but dramatic narrative, (3) how easy it is for a reporter trying to be professional to cross into the damage zone, knowingly or not, and (4) how much professional, social and economic pressure there is to cross into the damage zone, morality be damned.

For professional journalists, if the world of things they can say without entering the damage zone is X, the world of things the dark free speech artist can say is literally about 1,000X. Think about that. The playing field is heavily tilted to favor dark free speech over honest free speech. Dark free speech has about 1,000 players on the field for every player that honest free speech can muster.

That is how the human mind evolved. That is how our morals be damned, for-profit culture plays the game.


Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)

Dogs go through puberty angst as adolescents just like humans

Teenage dogs also rebel.

New research finds that canines aren’t immune to the puberty blues: Pooches also act out when they go through adolescence just like their human best friends.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, scientists from the UK’s University of Nottingham and Newcastle University present evidence that pups act out similarly to human teens when they are going through puberty. In the breeds researchers analyzed — Labradors, golden retrievers and crossbreeds of the two — these teen years generally occur when the canines are between six and nine months old.

While in their pubescent months, researchers found that dogs were more likely to ignore commands from their caregivers — but not strangers — and were overall harder to train. Dogs who felt insecure about their relationship to their owner, authors found, exacerbated the behavior. In pups, this is characterized by increased anxiety and attention-seeking when separated from an owner. Insecure female dogs had an increased likelihood of reaching puberty earlier, the authors found.

“This is a very important time in a dog’s life,” explains lead author Dr. Lucy Asher in a press release.

Owners should keep doggy puberty in mind before putting a pup in its adolescence up for adoption or going through the adoption process, the study adds.

“This is when dogs are often re-homed because they are no longer a cute little puppy and suddenly, their owners find they are more challenging and they can no longer control them or train them,” adds Asher. “But as with human teenage children, owners need to be aware that their dog is going through a phase and it will pass.”

The authors acknowledge that their research, while groundbreaking, is considered common knowledge by some.

“Many dog owners and professionals have long known or suspected that dog behavior can become more difficult when they go through puberty,” says co-author Dr. Naomi Harvey. “But until now there has been no empirical record of this. Our results show that the behavior changes seen in dogs closely parallel that of parent-child relationships, as dog-owner conflict is specific to the dog’s primary caregiver and just as with human teenagers, this is a passing phase.”

And yelling at your pooch won’t make it pass faster, studies show, it just will ruin their fluffy lives.

“It’s very important that owners don’t punish their dogs for disobedience or start to pull away from them emotionally at this time,” says Asher. “This would be likely to make any problem behavior worse, as it does in human teens.”

https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/dogs-go-through-puberty-angst-as-adolescents-just-like-us-study/